If there’s one thing the British love more than a hero, it’s a heroic failure. Few individuals fit this category better than the 19th-century polar explorer Sir John Franklin. If his memorial in London’s Waterloo Place is to be believed, he cut an impressive figure: firm-jawed and barrel-chested, his statue gazes towards the horizon as if searching for new worlds to conquer. The reality was very different.

A podgy, balding Royal Navy officer, by the age of 40 he had already achieved an unenviable kind of fame, after he led an overland expedition to chart the north coast of Canada, during which half his men starved to death and Franklin himself earned the nickname The Man Who Ate His Boots. But it wasn’t until he led another Arctic expedition in 1845, this time to find the fabled Northwest Passage, that Franklin truly became a household name, although again this was because of what he had failed to do rather than what he had done.

A search party found a chronometer, four teaspoons, and some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth

Several years after he should have returned, a search party stumbled across a sad trail of relics in the snow, including a chronometer, four teaspoons, and a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, together with some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth. What had begun as a voyage into the icy unknown had apparently turned into a real-life Heart of Darkness. Despite angry protestations from such influential figures as Charles Dickens, and a determined one-woman campaign by his widow Lady Jane, it looked suspiciously as if Franklin (or one of his crew) had become The Man Who Ate His Men.

Although the story of this disastrous voyage has often been told, two things distinguish Michael Palin’s revisiting of it. The first is that he’s Michael Palin, which means that his narrative is driven by a deep sympathy for explorers and adventurers, while also being illuminated by flashes of gentle wit. (Whales are so reluctant to hurry, he points out, that their lives appear to be like “the human equivalent of taking very long baths”.) The second is that he has plenty of new material to draw on, the most important of which was the discovery of Franklin’s ship HMS Erebus by a Canadian underwater archaeology team in 2014. Lost for almost 170 years, it lay virtually intact on the Arctic seabed, swaddled by strands of kelp and preserved by the ice like a giant ship in a bottle. In classical mythology, Erebus usually referred to the depths of the Underworld, and the ship that bore this name had certainly found a suitable resting place for itself.

But before Franklin took it on its final voyage, Erebus had spent several years successfully exploring other equally bleak parts of the planet, and it is this previous life that forms the first two-thirds of Palin’s book. It’s a fascinating story that he brings full-bloodedly to life, stripping away the barnacles of the past to reveal the hidden history of a ship that spent years encountering places such as Cape Disappointment, Delusion Point and Exasperation Bay.

Commissioned in 1823, the 372-ton Erebus was one of the last warships known as bomb vessels. Designed to fling shells high over coastal defences, they are referred to in “The Star-Spangled Banner”, where “the bombs bursting in air” alludes to the fire from British bomb ships. A tough, squat vessel, she spent a couple of years patrolling the Mediterranean as a visible reminder that Britannia ruled the waves. But it wasn’t until she was converted from a warship to an ice-ship that Erebus acquired a distinct identity. Her hull was strengthened with six-inch oak planking, and extra thick copper sheeting was used to cover the bow from waterline to keel. Under the command of the dashing Captain James Clark Ross, the crew of the Erebus then spent the next four years voyaging further south than anyone had ever been before.

As Palin notes, they were “polar pioneers”, at one time even sighting the Antarctic continent itself: a barren white landscape that looked like a huge sheet of paper waiting for someone to write on it. Then came the more complicated mission of finding a way through the Arctic’s moving jigsaw puzzle of ice, which Ross declined and Franklin eagerly accepted. The main challenge with this sort of biography is that it’s hard to make life at sea sound interesting. A captain who ran a tight ship in the 19th century was thought to be one who kept his men busy with regular daily routines, occasionally punctuated by bursts of official violence when a sailor was thought to deserve a flogging. Even so Palin teases out some good stories, such as Ross and his men spending New Year’s Day 1842 dancing in an “ice-ballroom” they had created, where “ice-creams were handed round”, followed by “a sort of slapstick Antarctic Olympics”, where they attempted to climb greasy poles and catch greased pigs.

Palin also has a good understanding of the personalities involved, such as the ship’s surgeon and naturalist Robert McCormick, who had previously been on the Beagle with Charles Darwin, and claimed to be “a lover of the feathered race” despite taking every opportunity to blaze away at them before (no doubt lovingly) stuffing their carcasses. Like Franklin himself, such figures were obviously deeply flawed – gods with feet of slush – but Palin deals with them tactfully and kindly, recognising that it is precisely their failure to live up to their own heroic ideals that makes them so interesting to modern readers.

Just across the road from the Franklin statue in Waterloo Place is a memorial to Captain Scott, who was beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen. A few years earlier Amundsen was also the first man to cross the Northwest Passage by sea. And as Palin points out: “He has no memorial in London.”

• This article was amended on 28 November 2018. An earlier version referred to Captain John Ross commanding the Erebus voyage to the Antarctic. In fact that expedition was led by his nephew James Clark Ross.